I finally went back to the source and asked why people were being told I had lied. The answer was, “I didn’t tell anyone you lied. I only said you said one thing, and this other person said something else. Hmm. I don’t know who is telling the truth.”

Everyone hearing this already knew the person speaking was in conflict with me. The other person they were referring to was older, respected, and carried far more credibility with them than I did. “Ashley says this, but this respectable older person says something else” was never going to land as a fifty-fifty question in most listeners’ minds. Add a little pause and the concerned “I just don’t know who to believe,” and the wording placed one possibility much more firmly in people’s minds.

There was another problem, too. Two conflicting accounts do not automatically mean someone lied. People remember different details. They misunderstand conversations. They use the same words differently or describe separate parts of the same event. Framing the disagreement to others as “I don’t know who is telling the truth” quietly turned it into a choice between one honest person and one liar before anyone established a lie even took place.

The listeners reached the conclusion anyway. They came to me and called me a liar, while the person who led them there could point back to the exact wording and insist no accusation had ever been made.

I had not lied.

I have thought about that conversation often because it changed how I hear the ninth commandment. Most of us learned it as a rule against lying, but the wording is more specific: do not give false testimony against your neighbor. It is about what we say concerning another person when our words give other people a reason to judge them.

A conflict can be carried into a family, a church, social media, or a circle of friends through phone calls, prayer requests, group texts, private messages, or conversations. Once people outside the conflict are being given an account and forming judgments from it, someone’s name is being shaped in a whole community.

I understand people do need to talk outside a relational conflict sometimes. Counsel matters. Serious harm may need to be reported. Someone who feels confused or frightened may need help sorting through what happened. But we need to consider things like: How carefully and truthfully was the story told? Could that person actually help? Did the conversation help us see more clearly, including where we might be wrong? Or did we just keep talking to more and more people until we felt sure the other person was the problem?

Once we feel sure the other person is the problem, we may not need to accuse them outright. We can simply point to the number of strained relationships as though the headcount itself explains why they broke:

Three of the four adult children have a close relationship with their parents. Only one does not.

Hmm. I wonder who the common denominator is.

Or:

They are estranged from both sides of the family.

Hmm. I wonder who the common denominator is.

It sounds like an invitation to think, but in both cases the conclusion has already been supplied: the estranged person must be the problem.

The numbers are not meaningless, and they may give someone a reason to look more carefully. But they do not explain how each relationship broke down, or whether the people involved reached their conclusions independently. The other siblings also did not experience the fourth relationship. And estrangement from both sides of a family is not necessarily two separate pieces of evidence, especially if one side had already been hearing the other side’s account for some time. By the time problems developed in the second relationship, there may already have been an explanation in place for how to understand them. Each side may have its own complaints, but that does not mean they reached the same conclusion independently.

This is part of why Exodus warns people about carrying a false report, joining with a harmful witness, and following a crowd into an unjust judgment. A story can gain authority simply because more people begin listening to it and repeating it. Soon the size of the group feels like confirmation, even when no one knows anything beyond what the first person said.

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Several people may independently witness the same pattern, and their agreement can matter. But sometimes many people believe the same thing because one explanation traveled through the family before anyone heard another one. “Everyone knows what she is like” may still mean everyone was given the same interpretation of her.

Usually the interpretation begins with something observable. She stopped calling. She did not announce the pregnancy. She asked relatives not to share private information. She no longer attends family gatherings.

Then the reason gets added. She is punishing them. They’re withholding the grandchildren. Her husband controls her. She has always needed everyone to do what she says.

After enough repetition, the event and the explanation become one story. Someone may soften it with, “This is just what I think,” but the motive has still been placed in other people’s minds. Before long, they are no longer responding only to what happened. They are responding to an explanation the person being discussed may never even know exists.

Of course, patterns can give us good reason to suspect a motive. We make reasonable judgments from words and behavior all the time. Honesty still requires us to know when we have moved from an event we observed to a conclusion we drew. An inference may be well supported, but it is still an inference.

Sometimes a person knowingly creates a false impression. Other times they become so certain of their interpretation that they stop recognizing it as an interpretation at all. Sincerity does not turn an assumption into a fact, and it does not remove responsibility for passing the assumption to other people as though the matter were settled.

The problem may not be in the date, the quotation, or the fact that a decision was made. It may be in how the details are arranged and what the audience is led to conclude from them.

“She says one thing, and these respected older people say something else. I don’t know who is telling the truth.”

One side of that comparison already carries age, standing, and credibility. The other person may already be viewed as difficult, emotional, or estranged from the family. Whatever the speaker intended, the question is unlikely to land as neutral. And if the audience concludes the absent person lied, the accusation has done its work even though no one stated it plainly.

The same thing can happen with completely accurate details. A screenshot can be real and still mislead. A quotation can be exact while leaving out the conversation that gave it meaning. “She did not tell us about the baby” may be true, but it tells the listener nothing about earlier breaches of privacy, refused conversations, or what happened the last time personal news was shared. “He sent a threatening text” tells us how someone characterized the message. It does not tell us what the message said.

Of course, a report does not become false simply because it harms someone’s reputation. Sometimes the truth is damaging. People should be able to report real wrongdoing, and no one is entitled to preserve a good reputation by hiding what they actually did. The question is whether the account is accurate, proportionate, and honest about what is actually known.

That question matters because words begin changing how everything else is interpreted. A defense becomes proof that the person is combative. A request for privacy becomes bizarre and unhealthy, and explaining why privacy became necessary is called an attempt to control the narrative. Eventually the story becomes almost impossible to correct because every response has already been assigned a meaning.

And once the story starts moving, the responsibility does not belong only to whoever began it. The people hearing and carrying it make choices too. They may not know whether every part is true, but uncertainty is a reason for care. It is not permission to repeat the account.

What did this person actually witness? What came from someone else? Was the absent person ever asked? Are we hearing an event, an interpretation, or a claim about motive? Did several people reach the same conclusion independently, or did one explanation move through the group?

Those are ordinary questions. They are also some of the questions most likely to disappear once a family becomes confident that it already knows who someone is.

I am not outside those questions simply because some of what I write are things that have been said about me. I have had family members name me publicly and describe me as religiously authoritarian, coercively controlling, and involved in “mini cult-like dynamics.” Those are sweeping claims about who I am and how I treat people, made by someone who had heard one side of a family conflict and never asked me about any of it.

I can say those claims were made and give the context needed. But I am not writing to publish a full account of my family or identify everyone involved. I look at patterns that reach beyond us, using only the details needed to make the point. That means quoting people accurately, including context when it materially changes the meaning, and staying with what happened rather than claiming to know another person’s heart or motives.

Correcting an accusation is not retaliation. It also does not give me permission to answer speculation with more speculation.

The same is true when a family disagrees with someone’s decision. They may think her reasons were inadequate, believe she handled the situation badly, and disapprove of her choices. But if they are going to explain to other people why she made certain decisions, they cannot leave out the reasons she gave and present their own interpretation as though it were simply the truth.

There is something deeply dishonest about hearing a person explain herself, deciding her reason does not make sense, and then speaking as though no explanation was ever given. Disagreement does not erase what she said, and it does not turn the family’s story into fact.

The ninth commandment is not satisfied because every sentence we used was technically defensible. It reaches the whole account we handed to other people: what we stated, what we implied, what we left out, and what we led them to believe about someone who was not there to answer.

“I never said that” is not a defense when other people were led to believe it anyway. Neither is “That was only my opinion” after suspicion was carried through a family, church, social media, or a circle of friends and changed how people treated the person being discussed.

And when our words have given people a false picture of someone, the honest response is not to defend the wording. It is to care more about correcting what people now believe than proving we never technically said it.

When the parent’s answer is dismissal, silence, more silence, and then severance, it hits you with a deep, quiet, heavy discouragement.

Recently, my mom blocked me on Facebook. There was no conversation beforehand, no argument, and I hadn’t posted anything. My dad blocked me shortly before that, and other extended family quietly removed themselves as well. Prior to that, one of my husband’s parents blocked both of our phone numbers after he reached out once to talk about something important, and that was it. No communication, no attempt. Just a closed door.

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I love my parents deeply. I think people assume estranged adult children are angry, and some are, but a lot of us are just… weary. I know when I describe what happened in my family, it can sound simpler than it was. There were years of small hurts and failed attempts at repair before we got to the point of drawing a line. I’ve heard it described as a thousand paper cuts, and that feels like an accurate description. But our one core ask was biblical and simple. When that wasn’t something they were willing to do, we said okay, we understand that’s your choice, but we are here with our door open.

I know some of you will wonder why I’m saying any of this publicly, and I’ve thought about that more than you’d guess. When I was in the thick of this, I went looking for help and found almost nothing for Christian estranged adult children. Everything I found was aimed at parents of adult children, and almost all of it assumed the adult child was a rebellious Prodigal. I write because that Christ-centered voice for adult children still barely exists, and it needs to. I also write for parents who are willing to look honestly at their own part in the distance, and for churches that don’t have language for any of this yet. I’m not trying to win an argument with my parents through a Substack article. I’m trying to give real, biblical footing to a conversation the church has almost entirely overlooked.

On that note, there’s a passage in Colossians I think the church needs to talk about more than it does, and I bring it up not as a weapon but as something I believe God meant for the good of families. In Colossians 3:21, Paul warns fathers not to provoke their children “lest they become discouraged.” The Greek is *athumeo*. It means to lose heart, to become spiritless. Paul is warning parents about what they can do to a child’s heart, and it should be taken seriously.

I don’t bring this up to hand adult children a Bible verse to throw at their parents. That’s not what Scripture is for. I bring it up because I think God put this warning in Colossians because he loves both parents and children, and because real love tells the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. Paul placed this warning inside what scholars call a household code, where he lays out mutual responsibilities within the family. He addresses children in verse 20, and then he turns to parents in verse 21 and tells them: do not provoke your children into losing heart. It’s one of the few places in the New Testament where Paul directly warns parents about a particular way they can wrong their children, and what he describes isn’t what most people picture when they hear words like “abuse” or “neglect.” He’s talking about provocation that results in a child becoming spiritless… drained of any expectation that things could change.

I can’t see my parents’ motives and I won’t pretend I can. I don’t know what goes through someone’s mind when they press that block button or what story they tell themselves about why it’s necessary.

But I can tell you what it looked like from my side when that door closed.

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I never removed my parents on social media, and I don’t say that to puff myself up or tell people to look at how great I am. Honestly, it sometimes made my heart ache to keep them there. It was hard to stay connected to people who didn’t seem to want reconciliation. But I did it on purpose, because I didn’t want to send the wrong message. I never wanted my parents to think, even for a second, that I didn’t want them in my life.

When my dad blocked me, it definitely hurt. But I remember thinking, “Well, at least my mom hasn’t.” She had me restricted, so I couldn’t see anything she posted anyway, but at least she hadn’t blocked or unfriended me. And I held onto that. I know it sounds small and even silly. But when most of the connections are already gone, you pay attention to the ones that are still there. That tiny thread was something I could point to in my own head and think, okay, maybe there’s still hope. And eventually, I noticed she blocked me too, and it just broke something in me. The last tiny thread I’d been holding onto, just… gone.

This is the kind of discouragement Paul was warning about. Not always one dramatic blowup, but a pattern of losses that accumulates until a person begins to lose heart.

Parents carry something in this dynamic that no one else does. A friend can walk away from you and it stings. But a parent’s silence reaches into a part of you that’s been there since you were a child, the part that still wants them to see you, still wants them to say “tell me what happened, I’m listening now.” That part doesn’t go away when you turn eighteen or thirty or forty. And a parent’s rejection lands there every single time, with a kind of despair that no other relationship on earth carries.

For the parents still reading, I want to say something I mean with all my heart. I know the word “boundary” lands hard. I know it can feel like your child is saying you weren’t good enough, or that they expect perfection, or that one mistake cost you everything. That reaction makes sense to me. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why it cuts so deep.

Most of the time, when your child sets a boundary, they are telling you what they need in order to stay in relationship because they haven’t given up. Every healthy relationship has terms under which it can flourish. And for Christians, honesty, repentance, and a willingness to hear the truth about ourselves should not be foreign things. Those are not hostile ideas, and they’re part of how relationships are repaired.

I know there are situations where cutting contact and removing connections is the right and necessary thing to do, on both sides, and that’s not what I’m addressing here. What I’m addressing is the parent who says they want reconciliation but hasn’t yet done the one thing their child asked of them. If your child told you what they needed, and you’ve dismissed it, that’s where reconciliation is waiting. Not in a phone call that ignores what they asked for. Not in a card or happy birthday text that pretends the request was never made. Reconciliation begins with taking your child’s request seriously enough to honor it, even if it’s hard, even if it means examining yourself honestly before God and repenting of what you find. Christians already know what it is to be corrected, to repent, and to let truth do its work. We don’t get to skip the repentance part and jump straight to restoration. We don’t get to say “let’s just move on” when God himself says “let’s deal with this first.” And your child, made in the image of God whether they’re a Christian or not, may be asking you for something God asks of all of us: hear the truth, take responsibility for your part, and let that be the foundation for something better.

I keep coming back to what I said at the beginning of this article. Most of us drew the line because we wanted to be closer, and watching that get answered with silence and severance can leave an adult child deeply discouraged in exactly the way Paul warns parents not to provoke. God took it seriously enough to put it in Scripture, and the church owes it to both parents and adult children to take it seriously, too.

If you’re a parent, I want to leave you with two questions. Is anything you’re doing right now making your child lose heart? And if you truly don’t know the reason there is distance, when was the last time you asked your child what they needed from you?

Because I can tell you from the other side of it: your child is paying attention. They notice what you do. They notice what you don’t do. And I promise you this: they are still, even now, looking for reasons not to give up.

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The friend gets defensive. She says she can talk to whoever she wants. She doesn’t apologize. She goes to their mutual friends and shares her version of events, and now the woman who raised the concern is fielding calls from people telling her she’s being dramatic, she’s overreacting and needs to forgive and move on.

The friendship fractures.

Months go by. And then the messages start. “I miss you. I just want things to go back to how they were. Why can’t we move past this?” Every message feels like pressure, reopening the wound without offering any reassurance that the pattern will change. She’s just asking for the relationship back, and every time she does, it creates a new fight. The very pursuit of closeness, without any willingness to address what broke it, has become the source of fresh conflict between them.

You’re watching this from the outside and something about it bothers you. Wanting reconciliation sounds right, and the desire for it sounds loving. But she never addressed what she did and never acknowledged the damage. She wants the relationship restored on her terms, which means without repentance, without accountability, and without anything inside her actually changing.

The desire for closeness is honorable, but desire without repentance just repeats the cycle.

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We can see the problem so clearly when it’s someone else, but can we see it in ourselves?

The principle goes deeper than we think.

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1)

Within you. James traces quarrels and fights back to the passions at war within our own human hearts. Before the conversation that went sideways, the desire to get what we want was already raging beneath the surface. The relationship is just where it finally bubbled up and became visible.

Most of us skip past this verse too quickly because we think we already know where James is headed. We assume the desires he’s talking about look obviously sinful. Greed, lust, jealousy… stuff we’d easily recognize if we saw it in the mirror.

But James is more unsettling than that. He’s describing the way unmet desires within us often become the reason for quarrels and fights. The desire may have started as something understandable… wanting your family to be whole, wanting to believe you were a faithful parent, or even wanting to clear your own name. Those longings are very human. But by the time James is addressing them, they’ve already produced ugliness. Verse 2: “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.” The fruit tells you what the root has become. When the desire to be seen as a good parent produces denial, distortion, blame-shifting, or a willingness to protect image at the expense of love, that desire has stopped being a longing and has turned into a master. James is writing to believers, people who love God, and he’s telling them that the thing running their relationships may not be what they think it is.

Think about what this looks like inside a marriage. A husband loses his temper and says harsh things, sometimes in front of the kids. His wife comes to him and says, “The way you spoke to me last night wasn’t okay. It’s hurting me and it’s affecting the kids.” He hears “you’re a bad husband” and now he’s defending himself. He works hard, he’s faithful, and a good provider. By the end of the conversation, the wife is the one apologizing for bringing it up, and the sin she named has never been addressed. His desire to be seen as a good husband matters more to him than what God actually asks of a husband. And so the sin stays, the wife goes silent, and the quarrel goes underground.

It happens inside a church when leadership wants unity so badly that they treat every hard question as an attack. A member raises a legitimate concern and gets labeled “divisive.” The institution’s desire to protect its own health becomes the thing that’s making it sick.

And it happens in families. An adult son or daughter comes to a parent with something that cost them a great deal of courage to bring, and the parent responds with everything except the one thing being asked for. They get defensive. They cry until the child ends up comforting them, and they reframe the whole conversation around their own hurt feelings. Somewhere beneath all of it, a desire to be seen as a good parent has become so loud that the actual child standing in front of them, carrying actual pain from the parent’s actions, has become an obstacle to it.

James 4 reveals something about these situations that most people miss entirely. The person doing the most damage in a broken relationship is often the one who sounds the most heartbroken about it. “I just want us to be close.” “I just want to see my grandchildren.” “I just want things to go back to how they were.” That language sounds like love, and it feels like love to the person saying it. And everyone around them tends to treat it that way.

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James would press harder. He’d want to know what’s underneath those words. Because wanting a relationship and being willing to do what God asks of all of us are two very different things. A person can desperately want closeness and simultaneously refuse to repent, refuse to grieve their sin, and refuse to look at what they’ve done. At that point, the person isn’t loving harder than everyone else in the room. They’re wanting harder.

You want this relationship. Okay. What are you willing to do to have it? Are you willing to repent? To look honestly at what you’ve done? To sit in the grief of what it cost the other person, even if you didn’t mean it? Or do you want the relationship handed back to you with nothing inside you changed? Because pursuing reconciliation and refusing repentance in the same breath is not love. It’s the desire James is warning about, so central to a person’s identity that they’ll sacrifice truth, accountability, and the other person’s wellbeing to keep it. And they won’t see the contradiction because the desire feels right. Who could argue with wanting your family to be whole?

James could. He’d call it the war within.

Verse 4 escalates the language in a way that would have stunned his original audience: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” This is covenant language, the same imagery the prophets used when Israel chased after idols. James reaches for it because he wants his readers to feel the gravity of what he’s saying. When a desire takes the place where God belongs, when it becomes the thing you will protect at the cost of honesty, integrity, and obedience to what Scripture clearly asks of you, that desire has functionally replaced God. You can still go to church. You can still pray. The loyalty has shifted.

The people closest to you can feel it even when they can’t name it.

I know this war. I’ve felt it in my own heart… the desire to be understood slowly turning into the bitterness I have to fight against. The longing for acknowledgment slowly crowding out the willingness to extend grace. I’ve felt the self-protective instinct, earned honestly through real pain, calcifying into a posture that leaves little room for God to move. I know James is talking to me in this passage, too. Every honest reader will find themselves somewhere in these verses, and that’s the whole point.

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (James 4:6)

Grace is more than sufficient for whatever you’re carrying, and it flows toward humility. James places this verse at the hinge of everything because the obstacle is not God’s unwillingness to give grace. The obstacle is pride, and pride is the effort to manage how you are perceived instead of reckoning honestly with what is true before God.

Then he describes what humility actually requires, and he is not gentle about it.

“Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” (James 4:9-10)

This is a call to grieve. Real grief. James is calling for genuine godly sorrow, not a simple acknowledgment and not a rushed “sorry” to get to resolution. He is describing the kind of sorrow that levels you. The kind you can’t fake.

If you’ve ever been in a broken relationship where the other person wanted to skip straight to “let’s move forward,” you know how hollow that feels. You’re standing there holding the full weight of what happened, and they’re already at the finish line waving you over, asking why you can’t just get past it. James says that impulse, the desire to move to resolution without passing through grief, is not peacemaking. It’s the proud posture that God opposes. The path runs through repentance and godly sorrow, and there is no shortcut around it.

This has implications that should make everyone in a broken relationship sit up and pay attention. When someone says, “I just want things to go back to normal,” James wants to know: have you mourned? Have you allowed yourself to sit in the weight of what your sin cost the person you love? Have you cleansed your hands, as he puts it in verse 8, or are you just reaching out with dirty ones and hoping the other person won’t notice?

Wanting reconciliation is not the same thing as being ready for it, and the distance between those two things is exactly the space James is describing. It’s the space where repentance lives. Where grief does its work. Where God gives grace to the humble and opposes the person who thought they could skip the hard part.

Holding a line in a broken relationship, saying “I love you and I cannot move forward while this remains unaddressed,” is one of the most painful things a person can do. It looks to the outside world like stubbornness or unforgiveness. It feels, on the inside, like you’re the one breaking something that you desperately wish was whole. But James describes a God who does not ask his people to pretend. A God who calls his people to repentance and truth, not resolution that leaves sin untouched. A God who opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble, and who has never once defined humility as treating unrepentant sin as though it were peace.

“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” (James 4:10)

The promise holds for all of us. For the one who needs to repent and is finally willing to grieve what they’ve done. For the one holding a line they never wanted to hold, doing the quiet, costly work of staying honest before God. For anyone willing to stop fighting the war out there and turn to face the one within.

God draws near to those who draw near to him. And drawing near starts with the thing most of us are most afraid of: getting honest about what we want so badly that we’ve been willing to let everything else burn to keep it, and then opening our hands and surrendering it to God.

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I know what’s been said about me. I’ve read the negative comments, and honestly, I wish I hadn’t sometimes, because once you read what people think of you without ever speaking to you… it’s a hard feeling to explain. It’s heavy. You carry it around while you’re making lunches and folding laundry and trying to be a normal mom on a normal Tuesday, and meanwhile someone out there is constructing a version of you that doesn’t exist and handing it to people who will never bother to check.

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I think most of us know we do this. We talk about people. We talk about their marriages, their parenting, their choices, their conflicts. We do it over coffee, on the phone, through text messages, in the church parking lot, and even as a prayer request. And it doesn’t feel wrong, because we tell ourselves it’s just what people do. Someone does something that “shocks” you and you call your sister because you just can’t believe it. A friend is going through something hard and you mention it to someone else because you’re “concerned.” You hear about a situation and you feel like people just need to know. Or you’re frustrated and feel like you need to vent, and you tell yourself it’s not a big deal because, well, it’s their fault anyway. They shouldn’t have done what they did, so you just need to get it off your chest and tell some people.

I did all of that, and I knew I did it. I just didn’t think it mattered. And then a few years ago, I started paying attention to how casually I could talk about someone else. Once I started being honest with myself about that, I needed something outside of myself to hold me accountable. It had to be a standard that didn’t shift based on how justified I felt in the moment.

There’s a verse that leveled me when I first really sat with it. Ephesians 4:29. “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Three tests. Not one. Are your words building anyone up? Do they fit this moment? Will they give grace to the people hearing them? Most of us grab whichever test makes us feel justified and skip the rest. We say “I was just telling the truth” and ignore whether the timing was right or whether grace was anywhere in the room. We say “they needed to hear it” without asking ourselves who our words were actually designed to serve. Because that last test is the one that’s almost impossible to fake. Grace has a direction. It aims at the good of the other person. And if you’re being honest with yourself about who benefited from what you said, the answer will tell you everything you need to know about whether your words passed or failed.

I saw every one of those tests fail in real time.

One of our babies had just been born. I was exhausted, aching, trying to nurse a newborn, and soaking in the peace and bliss of those first quiet moments with my sweet new baby. We hadn’t shared the news with everyone yet. We had a plan for that, and we’d asked the people who knew to please let us be the ones to tell.

They didn’t.

The calls and messages that started coming in weren’t congratulations. They were angry. People were offended they hadn’t found out sooner, offended it didn’t happen on their timeline, offended that we had the nerve to want to share our own baby’s arrival in our own way. I was lying in bed, freshly postpartum, reading words that I still can’t fully describe. Accusations. Vitriol. Cruelty. From people who were supposed to love us.

Proverbs says reckless words pierce like a sword, and I can tell you from experience it’s not a metaphor. I felt every one of them in my bone-weary, bleeding body, and those words crushed me.

No one ever asked what happened. The story grew and twisted and traveled to people I’ve never met, and by the time it settled, the version being passed around had nothing to do with the truth. People who weren’t there were attaching motives to us we never had, drawing conclusions about our character from a story they heard second or thirdhand. No one has ever come back to ask if any of it was true.

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I grieve that. I still do. That sacred postpartum time with my baby was supposed to be peaceful, and I spent it sobbing and trying to put out fires I didn’t start.

And every single person who sent those messages believed they were justified. That’s what I keep coming back to. The people who sent me angry, cruel messages after I gave birth probably believed their hearts were in the right place. When has anyone ever told themselves their heart was in the wrong place? We always believe we’re the exception, our situation is different, our anger is righteous, and our version is the accurate one. That’s what makes this so dangerous. The people who do the most damage almost never see it, because they’ve already decided they’re the ones in the right.

I’m not going to pretend everything is fine, because it’s not. I have enough to write a very different kind of article than this one. But I’ve been on the receiving end of someone else’s words about my life, and I refuse to put that burden on someone else, even someone who put it on me.

If someone’s words about you have ever left a mark, I’m sorry. I know that weight. I know how lonely it is to realize that someone constructed a whole version of your life and handed it out to people who will never hear your side. And I know how tempting it is to do the same thing back.

I’m not above it, though. That’s the thing that presses on me more than anything, honestly. How easily I’ve talked about people without considering what I might have shaped about them in the minds of others.

We’re all shaping something with our words, every day, whether we think about it or not. The only question is whether what you’re saying would build someone up. And whether you’d be okay with someone saying the same things about you, in the same rooms, with the same people, and the same amount of your side missing from the conversation.​​

I think about this every time I sit down to write, and every time I open my mouth about another person. Because I know the pain of careless words now that I didn’t used to know. I know what it’s like to be the person someone talked about on a Tuesday afternoon and forgot about by dinner, while I carried what they said into Wednesday and Thursday and the rest of my life.

Your words move on when you’re done with them. But the person you said them about doesn’t get to put them down.

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“You know, you don’t seem well.”

Maybe it comes out as “I’m concerned about your mental state,” or “someone has gotten into your head.” Or it arrives as the classic so many estranged adult children know by heart, “I’m thinking of calling the authorities for a wellness check.”

The conversation stops cold. Whatever you were saying is gone, replaced by an urgent need to prove that you are, in fact, well. And believe me, I have failed this test more times than I can count. Matching someone’s tone and firing an insult right back is the easiest thing in the world.

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It is also the moment you lose. Raise your voice or send the cutting text to defend your sanity and make them hurt too, and control of your own spirit just changed hands.

Conflict often feels like a contest. Someone gets loud, so we get louder and sharper, because in the moment softness feels like surrender. Scripture says those instincts run exactly backward.

Proverbs 15:1 offers a strategy that feels counterintuitive. “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

Look at the mechanics of it. A harsh word gives the anger fresh fuel. Worse, with certain accusations, a harsh defense gets received as evidence. Yell “I am fine” loud enough and you have just demonstrated, in their eyes, the very instability they named. Nobody has ever argued their way into looking well. Escalation only testifies against you.

A gentle answer refuses to supply the fuel.

Gentleness like that is power under control, and it almost never comes naturally. It has to be a deliberate choice.

So picture the “you don’t seem well” moment again. A reactive person shouts, “I am fine! You’re the problem, not me!” Strength lowers its voice and says, “I am doing well. I can see we aren’t getting anywhere right now, so let’s take a break.”

That is real power.

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None of it comes cheap. Gentleness under accusation requires dying to self, and pride does not die quietly. Everything in us wants vindication, to win the argument, and to hear them finally say how they treated you wasn’t okay.

Jesus took this exact test and passed it quietly. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate. Peter tells us how that was possible. He entrusted himself to the One who judges justly. The verdict on Jesus was never going to be issued in that courtyard, so he did not fight for it there.

The same holds for all of us. If you need your family to certify that you are sane, you will live at their mercy, and the hearing will never end. You answer to God, and he is not confused about your condition. Settle that, and the insults have nothing left to grab. You can stop fighting and simply stand.

So the next time the harsh word comes, refuse to return it. Let it fall to the floor. Proverbs says whoever rules his own spirit is mightier than the one who takes a city. Cities fall to force all the time. A ruled spirit never does.

Months passed. Nothing. We tried again… and again. Complete silence.

Then a holiday came, and a cheerful text arrived. Short, pleasant, and friendly. Acting like that conversation didn’t exist.

I stared at it for a long time. Our questions were still sitting there unanswered, and now here was this little greeting pretending everything was fine. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also couldn’t pretend. So I wrote back something like: “Thank you for thinking of us. I need to be honest, though. It doesn’t feel right to exchange pleasantries when our questions are still sitting there unanswered. We want a relationship with you, but it needs to be built on honesty. Please just tell us where you stand.”

No response.

Then Thanksgiving came, and my phone buzzed again. “Happy Thanksgiving from our home to yours! Gobble gobble!”

And I realized, oh. This is the strategy. This is what we’re going to get. Not engagement, not honesty, and no attempt to actually work through anything. Just silence on the hard stuff and cheerful holiday texts to maintain the appearance that everything is hunky-dory.

If you’re walking through family estrangement, you’ve probably experienced some version of this. And if you have, you probably felt crazy the first few times. You might still feel crazy. You’re holding your phone looking at a friendly message from someone who won’t answer basic questions about real harm, and you’re the one who feels guilty for not just saying “You too!” Something is deeply wrong with that picture, and it’s not you.

When someone refuses to engage in a hard conversation and then sends a cheerful holiday text, they’re communicating something whether they realize it or not. The message is: I’m not going to address that, and I’m going to see if you’ll go along with pretending it doesn’t need to be addressed. The text isn’t really an invitation back into relationship. It’s an invitation back into pretending. And if you accept it and send back something warm and pleasant, you’ve just taught them that this works. Wait long enough, send something friendly enough, and the whole thing goes away.

I truly don’t think most parents who do this see themselves as manipulative. In their minds, they’re being gracious and extending an olive branch. They’re letting things blow over, and the loving thing to do is move on. Time heals, right?

But you can’t declare true peace when harm was never acknowledged.

Now you’re the one who won’t let it go. You’re bitter and can’t accept an olive branch. You’re holding a grudge, being unforgiving, and determined to stay stuck in the past.

That holiday text may even be shown to family and friends with a message like, “I keep reaching out and they keep pushing me away.” And everyone will nod sympathetically because, understandably, that’s what it looks like from the outside. People see the friendly text, but they don’t see the months of stonewalling that preceded it. The holiday text becomes evidence of your parent’s good faith, and your response becomes evidence of your hard heart.

But reaching out isn’t repair. You can reach out every holiday for the next ten years and never once address the thing that fractured the relationship. You can send a hundred turkey emojis and still be in complete avoidance.

It took me a while to get here, but I’ve come to understand what that holiday text a little more. Whatever its intent, it is functioning as a substitute for repentance. It’s offering the warmth of restored relationship without any of the honesty that restoration requires. And when you accept it at face value, when you play along and respond in kind, you’re agreeing to let the substitute stand in for the real thing. You’re saying, okay, I guess this is all I’m going to get, and I’ll pretend it’s enough.

I don’t think you have to do that, and I don’t think God asks you to do that.

Scripture is pretty clear that reconciliation isn’t just a feeling or a vibe. It moves through specific territory. It requires truth and acknowledgment. It requires repentance, which isn’t just feeling bad but actually turning around and walking differently. When Jeremiah warns against those who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace, he’s talking about exactly this: people who paper over real fractures with pleasant words and call it faithfulness.

But here’s the thing: pleasant words aren’t the solution; they’re the lie.

Holding the line doesn’t feel powerful. It feels like loss. You’re not standing there with your arms crossed, proud of your boundaries. You’re standing there holding the thing you asked for, the honesty, the repair, the actual relationship, and watching someone choose a turkey emoji over all of it. The division was already there. You didn’t create it by naming it. But you’re the one who has to live with the naming, and that’s a kind of grief that doesn’t get talked about much. The grief of being the only one in the room who won’t pretend. It’s not bitterness. But it’s not nothing, either. It’s the weight of loving someone enough to want the real thing and being handed a counterfeit instead.

I wish I could wrap this up with a promise. I wish I could tell you that faithfulness eventually gets rewarded with a phone call where everything finally gets honest, where the parent who’s been sending holiday texts for years suddenly says, you were right, I should have listened, let’s actually talk.

But here’s what I can say with confidence: you are not in sin for telling the truth, and you are not causing division by declining to sweep things under the rug. The call to be a peacemaker was never a call to participate in false peace, and the command to honor your parents was never a command to let them cause harm while you smile and nod. You’ve done the harder thing by remaining honest and open, even when it made you the villain in someone else’s story. If that’s bitterness, then so was every prophet who refused to say “peace, peace” when the house was on fire. You’re in good company.

That’s a hard place to stand, but it’s solid ground. And you don’t have to let a turkey emoji make you doubt it.

And it’s protected by a misuse of the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and mother.”

That line becomes a blank check. It gets used to silence disagreement, override a spouse’s input, and shut down any conversation about boundaries, decisions, or autonomy. Not because the command requires these things, but because the family hierarchy demands them.

This isn’t just bad interpretation. It’s the seed of idolatry.

It’s an operating system where the parent’s word carries moral weight, and questioning it or choosing differently gets labeled as rebellion. What emerges is a theology that elevates hierarchy while ignoring humility, protecting position over relationship.

So how does this hierarchy survive, year after year, without being exposed?

It controls who gets to talk.

Controlling the Narrative

An idol doesn’t just demand worship. It builds an entire system to protect itself from being questioned. And when the idol is permanent parental authority, that system has to do one thing above all else: prevent the adult child from being heard.

Because if the adult child’s account of what happened stands on equal footing with the parent’s account, the hierarchy collapses. Two adults, telling two different versions, with no one automatically privileged? That’s equality. And equality destroys the idol.

So the system runs on narrative control.

As an example, conversations about repair rarely stay between two people. A son or daughter tries to speak privately with a parent, hoping to address something specific or personal. But by nightfall, the conversation has been shared, repackaged, and analyzed. Siblings hear a version of it. Extended family hears another. Church members hear it framed as concern or a prayer request. And a story takes shape that has nothing to do with what was actually said.

This gets even more complicated when the adult child marries. Because now there are two sets of parents, and when the parents and in-laws align, the dynamic becomes nearly impossible to escape.

When both sets of parents compare notes about the couple’s decisions, share “concerns” about boundaries, and reinforce each other’s belief that their adult children are being unreasonable, suddenly the couple becomes the problem. The parents become the reasonable ones just trying to understand, and what gets framed as “figuring things out” or “supporting each other” is actually an alliance to preserve power.

The irony is, these same parents would never share the details of a private pastoral conversation without consent. They understand confidentiality in that context. But when it comes to their own adult children, privacy doesn’t seem to apply. They feel entitled to recount private matters to anyone they choose, including matters their children explicitly asked to keep private.

Churches rarely see this for what it is because it hides behind spiritual language. It looks like concern and sounds like prayer. But Scripture doesn’t carve out exceptions for family when it commands believers to guard their tongues. The same God who calls gossip destructive doesn’t say, “unless you’re talking about your kids.”

This is how the idol of family hierarchy protects itself. Not through force, but through narrative control. When the parent’s version becomes the accepted story, the hierarchy is preserved. Because as long as the parent controls the narrative, they control who’s seen as reasonable and who’s seen as rebellious. And that’s all the idol needs to survive.

The fallout is devastating. The adult child becomes isolated. Everyone has already heard the parent’s version, so the adult child’s perspective gets dismissed before they have a chance to speak. Trust disappears. History gets rewritten in ways that can’t be corrected because the narrative circulates faster than truth. What began as one vulnerable conversation becomes a parallel reality where the parent is the victim and the adult child is the villain. And by the time the adult child realizes what’s happened, their words have already been weaponized, motives judged, and their reputation has been ruined behind their back.

When the Idolatry Surfaces

When adult children finally set a boundary, like pausing the discussion until a simple request for private communication is honored, the reaction exposes what was always underneath. The hierarchy feels threatened. The parent hears a boundary as rejection. And their unspoken position surfaces, often in a few startling, revealing sentences:

“You are not my mother or father.”

“I don’t need your permission for anything.”

“We are not two adults working something out.”

“You are the child, and I am the parent.”

Treating a simple request as an attempt to dominate the parent reveals what’s been true all along. The parent has taken their role and elevated it to the place where only God belongs. They’ve positioned themselves as the permanent moral authority over another adult’s life, expecting submission that Scripture reserves for God alone. They demand chapter and verse obedience for personal preferences that have no chapter and verse. This is idolatry.

The focus almost always lands on the adult child’s supposed disrespect. But in Scripture, James tells us where quarrels actually come from: the desires that battle within us. We want something but don’t get it, so we quarrel and fight.

The parent wants authority, decision-making power, or access. These might seem neutral, but they easily become demands. And the Bible exposes this clearly. When we don’t get what we want, we fight for it, justify it, and make it sound righteous. But really, it’s all about getting our way.

Often, that’s what is happening when the parent reaches for honor your father and mother. It’s being used to end the conversation, not build relationship. Birth announcements, parenting choices, holiday plans, whatever the parent wants becomes what honor requires. The command stops doing theological work and starts shutting down discussion. It silences any question about whether their expectation was reasonable, biblical, or even theirs to have in the first place.

James exposes the mechanism: unfulfilled desires lead to conflict, and that conflict gets justified with whatever language makes it sound legitimate. In these families, that language is, often, “honor.” But the demand underneath isn’t about honor. It’s about control.

The Fear Underneath the Idol

So what drives that need for control? What makes letting go feel impossible?

Underneath that reaction is fear. Fear of losing control over how they’re seen.

Parents who build their identity on how their family looks will protect that image at all costs. When their adult child’s choices don’t align with the picture they want to present, it doesn’t just feel disappointing, it feels like exposure or embarrassment. And they will defend the image instead of the relationship every single time.

What makes this so difficult to untangle is that they genuinely believe they’re defending something righteous. They think they’re protecting family unity, biblical values, or godly standards. They don’t see themselves as protecting pride; they see themselves as protecting truth.

That’s why the system is so hard to escape.

The parent isn’t twirling a mustache, plotting control. They’ve convinced themselves that their authority is God’s authority, that their preferences are his standards, and that resistance to them is resistance to him. The idolatry is complete because they can no longer tell the difference.

God gives children to parents to raise for a season, not to own for life. Stewardship has an end point. Ownership does not. And when that line gets unconsciously erased, parents start treating their adult children the way only God holds the rights to: as if every choice, every decision, and every boundary is subject to their review and approval.

That’s the real danger of this kind of idolatry. It doesn’t just damage the relationship between parent and child. It distorts the adult child’s understanding of God himself. Because if your parent has spent your whole life positioning their authority as identical to God’s authority, how do you separate the two? If every boundary you’ve set has been called rebellion, how do you know when you’re actually resisting God versus resisting a system that was never his design?

The fallout isn’t just relational. It’s theological. And it doesn’t end with one generation. It gets passed down.

What Healing Actually Requires

For families shaped by this pattern, healing begins only when the hierarchy is surrendered. Not adjusted. Not softened. Surrendered in repentance.

Parents must be willing to see their grown children as autonomous adults under the same God, accountable in the same way, not as extensions of themselves to be managed. Without that shift, no amount of conversation will rebuild trust, because the structure itself prevents it.

But most parents shaped by this system will never make that shift, because surrendering the hierarchy would require them to admit they’ve been wrong, not just about a few decisions, but about the entire framework. And that kind of repentance is rare on its own. When “authority” is the dominant message and other Christian families operate the same way, where is the conviction supposed to come from? When everyone sees family hierarchy as a virtue, they aren’t just resisting personal conviction, they are insulated from it.

So the cycle keeps repeating: conversation, triangulation, reaction, repeat.

Eventually, the only way to “live at peace, as far as it depends on you,” is to step back from a system that makes peace impossible. And that decision may feel like failure, but it can actually be an act of obedience. You’re protecting what God has entrusted to you. Your marriage. Your children. Your own walk with him.

Stepping back doesn’t mean you stop loving your parents. It means you stop letting a distorted system define what love requires. You can honor your parents as people and refuse to honor a system that replaces relationship with rank. You can keep your heart open to reconciliation while accepting that reconciliation requires repentance.

This is hard. It goes against everything you were raised to believe about family loyalty and Christian duty. It will be misunderstood, misrepresented, and condemned by people who have never lived inside the system you’re describing.

But look at Jesus!

He had authority no earthly parent will ever have, and he used it to serve, not to control. He never weaponized his position to get his way or used guilt to maintain connection. He never treated relationship as something owed to him. He led by humility, not fear, and he gave honor instead of demanding it for himself.

That’s what real authority looks like. And it’s the exact opposite of what you experienced.

One demands to be served. The other serves in love. One protects its image at all costs. The other laid down his life, holding nothing back. One makes itself ultimate. The Other truly is.

The contrast doesn’t just expose the system. It frees you from it.

I had intentionally never talked to her about my family conflict. I’d stayed quiet about what was happening because I didn’t want her to think negatively of anyone involved or feel caught in the middle. But I later discovered that a family member had reached out to her and shared their side of our estrangement. And based on whatever she was told by that family member, my friend made her decision about me.

She told me she didn’t want to take sides. But she cut me off and stayed close with my family.

I was heartbroken. I kept thinking, how is cutting me off but not them not taking sides? How is ending our friendship while keeping theirs staying neutral? And from what I know of my friend, I genuinely believe she thought she hadn’t chosen. Because the story she heard first felt convincing enough, it didn’t feel like a choice to her. It felt like the truth, and she was just responding to what seemed obviously right.

There’s a verse in Proverbs that says, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” My friend heard the first case, and it seemed right to her. She never let me come and examine it. And because she heard their side first, she was convinced she wasn’t taking sides at all. She was just being supportive and just listening to someone who was hurting.

But listening to just one side is taking a side.

If an estranged parent has shared their story with you - if you’ve heard about their hurt and confusion and what their child did - I need you to understand something. You might think you’re just being a good friend by lending an ear and not getting involved. But you actually got involved the moment you listened to one version without any intention of hearing the other. You just might not realize it yet.

When you hear just one side of a conflict, you draw a picture in your mind and form judgments about who’s reasonable and who’s not. You develop sympathy for the person in front of you and suspicion toward the person who isn’t there to defend themselves. And once that picture is formed, it’s almost impossible to unsee it. Even if you later hear the other side, you’re hearing it through the lens of the first story. That’s why Proverbs says the first side always sounds right. Because it’s convincing, you may have no reason to doubt it. The person telling it believes their version, their pain is genuine, and you naturally want to help by lending an ear.

But there’s a problem with that sympathy. It doesn’t stay between you and the person you’re comforting. When you tell a hurting parent “that’s so sad,” they don’t just feel comforted. They feel validated. And that validation becomes part of their story: “I’ve talked to people about this, and everyone says it’s so sad. Everyone agrees with me. Everyone thinks what my child is doing is terrible.” The sympathy you offered for their pain gets turned into evidence against their child. “I’m sorry you’re hurting” often becomes, in the parent’s mind, “You’re right to be hurt.” Your comfort becomes confirmation that they’re the victim and their child is the problem. And they tell their adult child, “Everyone thinks you’re the crazy one.”

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That parent is likely sharing about the estrangement with a lot of people, each listener responding with sympathy and forming an opinion of the adult child based solely on what the parent is saying. People who think they’re just being supportive rarely realize they’re reinforcing a story in the parent’s mind… a story built against someone who isn’t there to defend themselves.

And if an estranged parent is talking to you, there’s a good chance they’re not going to their adult child directly. That should tell you something. People who want reconciliation go to the person. People who want validation go to everyone else. But Jesus was clear about how this is supposed to work. If you have something against someone, you go to them first. Not to your friends, not to your community, not to everyone else who will listen. You go to the person. And if that doesn’t work, you bring someone in to help. But the first step is always direct conversation. Going to everyone except the person isn’t just ineffective; it’s the opposite of the process God laid out for making things right.

Sometimes a parent will say, “But people ask about my adult child. What am I supposed to say?” And I understand that. Estrangement is painful, and questions from well-meaning friends can catch you off guard. But if you’re the one asking, you need to understand what you’re opening. A casual “How are things with your child?” can invite either a restrained, honest answer or a list of grievances that look like updates. And if you listen, it will shape how you see that adult child in a room they’re not in. A careful response sounds like “We’re not in contact right now, and it’s painful.” That kind of answer tells the truth without recruiting you into the conflict. The line gets crossed when an “update” turns into negative details and accusations that inevitably make you to think less of the adult child.

So if someone is coming to you with their hurt about their estranged child, here’s what neutrality actually looks like:

“I care about you, but I can’t be the person you talk to about your adult child. If you need to work through what’s happening, you need to talk to them directly or find a counselor who can help you process it. But I can’t hear grievances about someone who isn’t here to respond, because once I hear it, I can’t unhear it. I will form an opinion. And that’s not fair to either of you.”

That’s neutrality. Declining to be part of it at all, because you can’t stay neutral once you’ve heard one side. The human brain doesn’t work that way.

And here’s what you need to understand. As long as that parent has an audience of people who will listen and sympathize and validate their pain, they have no reason to do the actual work of reconciliation. It’s easy to think you’re helping by being a good friend, lending an ear, and offering comfort. But what you’re actually doing is giving them exactly what they need to avoid the one conversation that might change something. Your sympathy becomes their substitute for facing their child directly. Your listening becomes the reason they don’t have to. Real reconciliation requires people to talk to each other, not about each other. And every person who’s willing to hear one side without insisting on hearing the other is making that reconciliation less likely, not more.

The first side always sounds right. And believing it doesn’t make you compassionate.

It just makes you complicit.

Family stuff. What does that even mean? Like there’s regular sin the church addresses, and then there’s family sin that gets a pass because, well, it’s family stuff. Since when does God have separate standards depending on who’s doing the harm?

But unfortunately, that’s often how the church treats it. We’ll call out sin patterns in almost any other context. If someone at church is spreading your private business to others, talking about you behind your back instead of coming to you directly, we’d say that’s wrong. That’s not how Christians are supposed to treat each other. But the second it’s a parent doing that exact same thing, the rules change, and that is not okay.

What we’re doing here is creating a loophole. Family gets to do things we’d call sin in anyone else, and we act like the one in the wrong is the one trying to speak up.

Except that’s not what Scripture teaches. God doesn’t have different standards for family. The same commands that apply everywhere else apply in families too. Love your neighbor. Speak truth. Don’t gossip. Don’t lie. Bear with one another in love. What you won’t find in those passages is a footnote that says except if you’re family, then you can ignore all of this.

And I think when we excuse sin because it’s family, we’re not just failing the person being harmed. We’re failing the person doing the harm too. Because if no one ever tells them what they’re doing is wrong, if the church won’t get involved because it’s family stuff, how are they supposed to know they need to repent? Furthermore, how can any of us grow if no one helps us see our own sin? When we stay silent and act like things that happen in families don’t count, is that even love? The kind of love Scripture calls us to doesn’t leave people comfortable in what’s destroying relationships. Love steps into the mess and speaks truth, so change and healing are possible.

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A few years ago I tried to talk to someone about what was happening in my personal life. I explained the pattern, the harm, and the fact that I’d asked them to stop and they said they would not. The response? Well, they’re clearly in sin and it’s not okay, but you know how families are. Every family has issues. No one is perfect.

And I remember thinking, I don’t expect anything close to perfection. I’m asking them to stop doing something that’s destroying me and the relationships around me. But because it’s family, suddenly I’m supposed to just take it. Suddenly the sin doesn’t count.

But sin is sin. Gossip is gossip whether it’s a parent or a stranger. Lying is lying. The relationship doesn’t change the nature of what’s being done and the damage that happens because of it.

The church has, I believe, unintentionally failed people by making family this loophole where we can pick and choose which standards apply. We’ve told people that honoring parents means accepting whatever they do. We’ve refused to get involved because it’s family stuff, as if that means it’s not really sin or not something God cares as much about.

But God does care. He cares when people are being harmed and when relationships are falling apart, even if the person harming them is their own parent or family member.

If we really believe God’s standards matter, then we need to stop acting like they only matter outside the home.

The good news is it doesn’t have to stay this way. The church can do better. We can start calling sin what it is, even when it’s family sin. We can stop hiding behind “family stuff” and start helping people address problems. And we can trust that God’s standards aren’t there to destroy families, they’re there to make them whole. Real love doesn’t excuse sin. It addresses it.

I just sat there and stared at the screen, hoping I had misread. Seeing those words felt devastating in a way that’s hard to describe. It’s one thing to disagree, but it’s another to use eternity as some kind of proof I’m “doing Satan’s work.”

The reason for this? A few years ago, I asked that if there are concerns about us, they be brought to us directly rather than discussed behind our backs with others, which is what Scripture calls us to do. When they made it clear the harmful behavior wouldn’t stop, distance resulted. And now I’m being told those reasons aren’t justified.

As I’ve been sitting with this text today, something dawned on me. This is what spiritual abuse looks like. It makes your relationship with God contingent on your relationship with others. It uses the most serious spiritual reality there is, your eternal soul, as leverage to get you to sweep harm under the rug and comply. It steals your testimony, kills trust, destroys relationships, and blinds people to what’s actually happening. And it does all of this while claiming to be concerned for your soul.

Genuine spiritual concern doesn’t do that. Genuine concern asks questions and listens to understand, not to accuse. It considers that maybe someone is following God and still makes decisions you don’t personally agree with. It doesn’t immediately jump to “you must be deceived” or “you’re being led by Satan” just because you’re holding a line they don’t like.

Genuine concern does not weaponize salvation. It doesn’t make your standing with God dependent on whether you give them what they want. It doesn’t say that the mere existence of distance is proof you’ve walked away from Jesus.

Sometimes following Jesus costs you and puts you at odds with the people closest to you. It means choosing what’s right over keeping everyone happy and comfortable on the outside. Jesus himself said he came to bring division, that following him would set family members against each other. Those are hard words, and it’s painful to even consider that they might apply to those we love most. One thing I know for sure: none of us want this outcome. We want our faithfulness to God to unite us, not fracture us. We want our families whole.

But what if following Christ sometimes separates families, not because you’re walking in darkness, but because you’re choosing light, even when it costs you?

When someone tells you that you are deceived because distance resulted when they refused what Scripture calls for us all, the assumption is that a true Christian would never let distance happen. That if you were really walking with God, you’d stay in relationship no matter what, regardless of the damage someone is causing. But that makes obedience to God look like doing whatever keeps your family happy. And those aren’t always the same thing.

You can love people deeply, honor them, forgive them, grieve the loss, pray for repentance, hope for change, and still not be in relationship. You can do the hard work of keeping your heart from bitterness while holding firm with people who choose division and have no interest in changing. You can grieve what’s broken while trusting that God is still faithful, even in the brokenness.

And none of that makes you unsaved.

Today I got a text that read, “We’ve talked to others about you, not with pleasure, always with a heavy heart. People usually say ‘that’s so sad.’ This is the reproach we have to bear.”

I sat with that for a while. And here’s what I kept coming back to: a heavy heart doesn’t make gossip something else. It’s still gossip. It’s still talking about someone to people who can’t do anything about it, people who don’t have the full picture and who are only getting one version of the story.

And I think we all do this. We tell ourselves it’s okay because we’re concerned or we’re asking for prayer. But if we’ve got a concern about someone, the first stop isn’t several people. It’s that person. That’s what love does. It goes to the person. It gives them the dignity of hearing the concern and responding to it themselves. It doesn’t build a room full of people shaking their heads in sadness and then hand them a verdict they never got to speak into.

Backdoor conversations are dangerous. They create narratives without the person there to correct them. They gather sympathy without accountability. They let us feel justified in our version of events because look at all these people who agree with us. But agreement from people who only heard one side is nothing more than an echo chamber.

And to the folks who hear these secondhand stories and nod along, who say “that’s so sad” or offer their sympathy, you need to know something. Your empathy is being used. It’s being used to validate a narrative you didn’t verify and prop up a version of events where the other person isn’t there to speak for themselves. If the person being discussed isn’t in the room, you don’t have the story. And if you can’t actually help repair the situation or aren’t willing to seek out and listen to both sides, you’re not the right audience for it.

It’s okay to say “this isn’t mine to hear.” It’s okay to say “have you talked to them directly?” It’s okay to send it back to the people who actually need to be having the conversation instead of letting yourself become part of what keeps reconciliation from happening.

Backdoor conversations wreck relationships. They quickly erode trust, and the quiet nodding does just as much damage as the talking. When we sit there and listen to a secondhand story, even if we mean well, we’re helping cement that version in the storyteller’s head. By the time it gets back around to the actual person involved, the narrative is already settled, the sides are locked in, and the person walking into the room doesn’t stand a chance when everyone has already decided who’s right.

So here’s what I’m asking. Choose light. Talk to people, not about them. If you’ve got a concern, take it to the person it’s about. If someone brings you a concern about someone else, send them back to have that conversation directly. And if you’ve been part of passing along concerns about someone without them there, go back and fix it where you spread it. Repair what your words broke.

Let’s have more actual conversations. Fewer side rooms. Less talking with a heavy heart to everyone except the person it’s actually about.